The German Constitution

[p. 604]

|604| for himself, unmindful that the more he enriches himself, the more he hastens his own and everyone’s ruin. If this drive to isolate is the only moving principle in the German Empire, then Germany is in unstoppable sinking into the abyss of its dissolution, and a warning against it would show indeed zeal, but at the same time the folly of an unnecessary effort. Should Germany’s course not still be at the parting of the ways between Italy’s fate and union into one state? There are chiefly two circumstances that give hope for the latter, two circumstances that can be regarded as a tendency against its dissolving principle.

Formerly, on the one hand, the territorial sovereignty³³⁾ of the prince or the city merged with freedom, especially religious freedom too, on the other the connection of the Empire…

33) In the margin: there lay in it political and religious freedom

3.

[Military power]

enemy of the Empire, the third a treaty of neutrality etc. and leaves the attacked fellow estate without help to the devastating superior force of the enemy and to his own weakness; one estate votes in the Imperial Diet that his connections do not permit him to take part in the raising of an army of the Empire and the payment of the Roman months for the war; are there for an estate of the Empire more sacred connections than its feudal duties towards the Empire? But no! The laws of the Empire give the estate of the Empire the right to conclude alliances with foreign powers; it has thus legally the choice between connection with the Empire and foreign powers. The Empire will not give itself a constitution by which it would be strong enough to protect its members against foreign enemies; the estate that is in danger is thereby put into the state of nature and is entitled and obliged to provide for itself as well as it can; it would be most unnatural to demand that it rely on a protection that, as is known to the world, is unable to protect and is legally and by right refused through the right to conclude alliances, hence not to furnish the protecting contingents; it becomes necessary for the weaker to place themselves under the protection of foreign powers,

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